Project Details

Tree Planet

Tree Planet’s dream is for green to be the most visible colour on our planet. The Korean start-up aims to make this happen by combining gaming and crowdfunding to plant new forests worldwide.

The Tree Planet game can be played on smartphones or online through a web browser, and is a novel way of tapping into the huge resources of the gaming community by empowering gamers to make a real difference to the environment, from virtual to reality.

Players plant and care for a baby tree, watering the seed, protecting the sapling from grazing sheep and caring for it as they would a pet. If they look after it properly and it grows to maturity, Tree Planet plants a real tree. Players receive photographs and updates on their real trees with letters from Tree Planet, giving them information on the location of their adopted tree and the health of the forests.

Alongside the revenue raised from in-app purchases and advertising, Tree Planet has ongoing crowdfunding campaigns such as a recent campaign spearheaded by Audrey Hepburn’s eldest son Sean Hepburn Ferrer to plant a forest as a memorial to those who lost their lives in the sinking of the MV Sewol in 2014.

Tree Planet is backed by local seed investor Crevisse Partners and accelerator SparkLabs Korea. On the ground, they collaborate with NGOs such as World Vision to handle local logistics and educate villagers on how to turn seedlings into fruit-bearing trees.

By August 2015 Tree Planethad achieved 1.05 million downloads on Android and iOS, and been responsible for the planting of 500,000 trees in 80 forests across 10 different countries.

Download the app to grow your own virtual tree and see it become a real one, or support one of Tree Planet’s crowdfunding campaigns by visiting www.treepla.net.

Image courtesy of Tree Planet.

Last updated: 13th of August, 2015

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